Scarface (36 page)

T
HE CAR WAS no problem. Tony drove to the docks and parked it beside a rotting warehouse that seemed to be crawling with vermin, human and otherwise. The Shadow was still slumped against the door as Tony and Nick got out. Tony retrieved the box from the floor and heaved it into the river. He left the car unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. He figured there were water rats who’d steal it without getting squeamish about a hitman with his face blown off. If they didn’t steal it, at least they’d strip it within the hour.

As Tony and Nick walked a few blocks west to catch a cab, Nick began to calm down. He had a short attention span when it came to death, and besides, Tony’s good cheer was infectious, even if it required a dose every fifteen minutes. They taxied back to the Sherry, and Tony put in a call to the New York police, reporting his rental car stolen. “It’s a damn shame,” said Tony to the sergeant who took the call, “that a man can’t come to New York and have a good time without gettin’ ripped off. What’s the world comin’ to, huh?”

Then they packed the bags and took a cab to Kennedy. They got caught in a tangle of rush-hour traffic, but the cabbie was more than glad to while away the hour getting ripped on Tony’s coke. They reached the Pan Am terminal about twenty minutes before flight time. Tony put in a call to Manolo in Miami, but once again there was no one home. Tony had a moment of confusion when he couldn’t remember what was on for today. Were they getting the boats ready to unload a trawler off the Keys? Had the half of the coke that wasn’t going to Nashville arrived in Miami this morning, or was that next week? Or was that last week?

Tony snorted a double dose from the inhaler and dialed his own number, hoping Elvira wouldn’t pick up. He wanted to talk
business.
He needed to be in charge again, so he wouldn’t start thinking too hard about the ramifications of the Shadow’s death. Chi-Chi answered.

“Hello boss,” he said cheerfully. “How’d it go?” At least he wasn’t nodding out.

“It went shitty,” retorted Tony. “I got Bolivian blood all over my nice gray suit. I look like a butcher. Where the fuck’s Manolo?”

“I don’t know, Tony. He ain’t been around since he got back last night from wherever the hell he was.”

“Nashville. You better go find him fast, Chich. ’Cause he’s in charge, and if anything gets fucked up while I’m away, I’m gonna hand him his ass. And then I’m gonna hand you yours.”

“Boss, whatsamatter? You don’t sound too good.”

“Yeah, well I caught a little cold.” He snorted twice. “Who’s he screwin’, Chich?”

“I dunno, Tony. He’s like a kid he’s so happy. Let him go with it, huh? Everything’s fine here. The grass came in last night, and it’s real pretty stuff. It’ll go for a hundred and a half an ounce. We got eighty tons.”

“Find him, Chich. I need to talk to him.”

The flight was announced to Miami/Lauderdale. Nick was beckoning from the gate. He clearly wanted to get out of New York posthaste.

“Tony, your Mama’s been callin’ all day. She sounds freaked out.”

Tony only half took it in. He asked about Elvira, who hadn’t been out of her room since he left. She’d eaten nothing from the trays that were taken in. Tony issued a couple of orders and demanded that the limo be there to pick them up when they landed. As he hung up the phone he experienced a terrible tightness in his chest, as if he couldn’t keep track any more of everyone he’d lost. He was scared of the sorrow that waited to weigh him down. More scared of that than of anyone out there who might have his name at the top of a list.

He loped across to the gate, and he and Nick took their places in first class. They didn’t speak the whole way down. Not that Nick was brooding very much. As long as he’d managed to get away, he had no trouble putting the events of the morning into perspective. Because he was not the boss, he didn’t have to anticipate the confrontation with Sosa. He ate like a pig again, the very same meal he’d eaten the day before, double helpings.

Tony was very tired, and the only thing that kept him awake now was the coke. He tried to focus on business matters, glancing over reports from his accountants and various memos about his case from George Sheffield. It didn’t seem to occur to him that he’d probably blown the deal with the Feds and would have to serve time after all. He didn’t seem very connected to the future, or at least not beyond the next twelve hours. What he had to do was find Manolo and sit him down and figure out where it had all gone wrong.

Though it calmed him some to read the numbers and see how much he had, he was having a terrible time with time itself. Was it four months ago he got married? Six months ago that he made his first deal on a kilo? He couldn’t seem to put together the twenty million dollars he’d made with the time frame in which he had made it. He got no satisfaction out of being an overnight success, perhaps because the speed of the process had left him no ground to stand on. Besides, time was speeding faster than Tony Montana. He felt old and sick inside. In his mind he kept seeing the man he was when they let him out of prison and sent him into exile. Tough and strong and unstoppable. He couldn’t say where that man had gone.

And somehow he kept coming back to Manolo, and he grew increasingly angry and betrayed. Manolo was full of deceit. He’d probably made some private deal and was only waiting now for Tony to come crashing down. Perhaps he was even ready to lend a hand in arranging Tony’s fall. Well, just let him try. Manolo was an amateur at death. He would see what a true murderous rage could do if he dared to turn on Tony.

All the way to Miami his mind twisted back and forth, wanting to clasp Manolo like a brother and then wanting to brand him as a traitor. After a while he began to think about Elvira, and half of him wanted to gather her into his arms and love her all night long, and half of him wanted to throw her out. He blew hot and cold. He went from sentimental to paranoid and back again, as if those were the only faces of love he could focus on anymore.

Was it the coke? There was no way of knowing, he was never going to stop it now. He’d been taking a powerful antihistamine for days to clear his sinuses. He spilled more now than he snorted. The rush was still very real, it cleared his head like a vision. The streets were littered with gold again, and all he had to do was scoop it up. It only lasted a minute, of course, but a minute of vision was better than none. At least it was somewhere to go if you had to be all alone.

Martin picked them up at the airport in the gray stretch limo. Nick, sensing that Tony didn’t want company, rode up front with Martin. Tony dialed Manolo’s number on the car phone, and he let it ring for twenty minutes, all the way home. No answer. As he held the receiver to his ear, he flicked on the television set to
Kojak.
Then he turned off the sound and turned on the stereo. He opened the bar refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of beer, though he wasn’t thirsty at all. It was as if he was checking out all his toys to see if everything worked, to see if they still responded to his touch.

The peacocks scattered as they roared up the drive to the mansion. Chi-Chi was waiting at the door as Tony barreled out of the car. “D’you hear from him?” demanded Tony.

“No,” said Chi-Chi, “but Sosa called three times. He sounds real pissed. What happened, Tony?”

“I think he thinks I’m the wrong kinda hero,” retorted Tony dryly. He turned to Nick. “Go up t’ the office and put in a call to Sosa. It takes a fuckin’ half hour to get through. And find me some flake that ain’t been cut.” He flung the vial he’d been snorting from at the floor, smashing it on the tile. “This shit’s so weak, I might as well be sniffin’ bakin’ soda.”

“Boss, that’s the purest stuff we got.” Nick sounded wounded, as if he’d refined the batch himself.

“Don’t argue, will ya?” snapped Tony. “I got a headache the size o’ your ass.” Nick nodded and then beat a hasty retreat upstairs. Tony turned to Chi-Chi. “She up there?”

“Yeah, she’s up there all right. I tried to bring her in a cuppa coffee, and she pulled a gun on me.” Tony started to laugh. It was as if he hadn’t heard a joke in weeks. “It ain’t funny, boss,” said Chi-Chi. “She hit the fuckin’ door, but she coulda hit me.”

Tony’s laugh faded to a sickly grin as he grabbed Chi-Chi by the collar and yanked him close. “You got exactly one hour to find Manolo. You got that?”

“Yeah, sure boss.”

Tony shoved him away. Chi-Chi stumbled out the door and stood dazed in the driveway, like he didn’t know where to begin. Tony had them all on edge now. They tried to steer out of his way, or they shied and shuffled and looked at the floor, which only made him more furious. He stormed through the house complaining, tossing out orders. It was like turning all the dials in the limo. He didn’t need the sandwiches he ordered, or his list of dealers or his bank statements or anything else he was yelling for. He just wanted to feel the system responding to his touch. If it hadn’t been so late and he didn’t have so much to do, he would have gone out and spent money like water, just to show he was still Midas.

By the time he entered the office he was almost his old self again. He made rapid calls to his stockbroker, to the manager of the diamond company, the realty people, the zookeeper. As he listened to brief reports, he attacked the plate of roast beef sandwiches and guzzled a split of Mumm’s. In the middle of listening to a list of loans outstanding, he gave a surly nod at Nick.

“Hey, you think we could have some caviar or somethin’? I just got home, for Christ’s sake. I wanna celebrate.” Nick hustled his ass and disappeared. Tony picked up the phone and wandered with it out to the balcony. Streaks of sunset were on the sky, and a marvelous odor of lemons filled the air. From where he stood he could see the Bengal pacing his island. He never stopped. “Yeah, okay Stan,” said Tony into the phone, “I’m sure it can wait till tomorrow. Jesus, ain’t this a pretty time o’ day?”

Nick came back with caviar, a big Iranian tin of it, and a bottle of Cristal. Tony looked it all over and nodded. He sat down at his desk and took out a sheet of the cream-colored stationery he’d never once used, with the Coral Gables address engraved at the top. He wrote across it in a big clumsy hand: “Would the Queen like to have a drink with the King?” He sealed this in an envelope and handed it to Nick.

“Gimme five minutes,” he said.

And just then the phone rang with the call from Bolivia. Nick slipped out of the room. Only now did Tony pick up the vial of coke Nick had set on the desk. He answered the phone and identified himself to Sosa’s black aide in Cochabamba. As he waited for Sosa to be summoned, he tapped out lines on the polished mahogany surface of the desk.

“Is that you, Tony?”

“Whaddaya say, Noldo?”

“So what happened, babe?”

“We had some problems.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Somebody sent you a telegram, huh?”

“Not exactly, Tony. Our friend gave a speech today to the U.N. General Assembly. A speech we never expected to hear. Kinda spoiled our day.”

Carefully Tony rolled up a hundred. He bent down and snorted two lines, not loudly, but not trying to hide it either. It was getting to be dusk outside, and the light was pearly. Tony made no move to turn on a lamp. In the blue shadows that fell across the room, the cocaine gleamed in a lunar way like gold dust in the sun.

“Yeah, well that guy Alberto was a piece o’ shit, Noldo. The situation wasn’t quite the way we figured on, ya know. We hadda make some adjustments. Alberto got stuck. I hadda cancel his contract.”

Sosa spoke with extreme precision. “He was a very valuable man, Tony. You made a very big mistake.”

Tony laughed. “Hey Noldo, no big deal. I can find ya a hundred guys on the street’ll kill
anybody.
They’ll kill their fuckin’ grandmother. I’ll go up next week and waste him myself—but not his wife and kids, Noldo. You gotta find scum to do that.”

“There’s no next week, Tony. They found what was under the car. Gutierrez has got security up the ass now.” The grisly evenness of Sosa’s voice finally began to crack. Tony felt a spurt of pride when he heard it. He was younger and stronger than any of them. He
wanted
this man to hate him. Sosa started to shout: “Now all of a sudden the heat’s comin’ down—on
me,
Tony. Somebody’s gonna pay for that! You blew it, you peasant!”

“Hey wait a minute. Who the fuck you think you’re talkin’ to?”

Sosa’s rage exploded now. He was almost incoherent. “I told you the day I met you, you stupid spic! Don’t fuck with me! People fuck with me they get burned!”

Tony could hear him panting at the other end of the phone. He flashed on an image of an old man rutting, straining to keep it up. His own voice took on an icy calm. “I guess
you
’re the one made the big mistake, Noldo. You thought I was your bellboy, huh? No way. Nobody tells me what to do. ’Specially scum like you.” To punctuate this, he bent and snorted another line.

“This is war, Montana!”

“Great, Noldo, great. Let’s have a war. We can flush out the sewers, huh? And then you can kiss my ass.”

Sosa let loose with a stream of hysterical bloodlust. Tony dropped the receiver back in the cradle with a cocky sneer, as if he was offended by the Bolivian’s lack of decorum. He leaned back in his swivel chair with his hands behind his head, looking out on the mackerel twilight. The door to the office opened, and Elvira walked in. The light from the hallway fell on her golden hair, but her face was all in shadow as he turned to her.

“We supposed to do this in the dark?” she asked. Her voice was wonderfully warm and intimate just then. It was as if she was looking for a joke to laugh at. He loved her laugh.

Tony reached out to the wall and flicked a switch, suddenly bathing the room in honey-colored indirect light. Elvira was wearing a beautiful black silk dress, with her double strand of wedding pearls around her neck. In a way she looked as demure as she had the day she had left Baltimore. Except of course she was high right now. But very much in control: her long slim legs didn’t wobble a bit as she crossed toward the desk. Her smile was easy and mocking, completely self-aware.